Call For Papers

The ACL 2018 conference invites the submission of long and short
papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in all
aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language
Processing. As in recent years, some of the presentations at the
conference will be of papers accepted by the Transactions of the ACL
journal.

IMPORTANT NOTE

ACL 2018 adopts the new policies for submission, review, and
citation. Submissions that violate any of these policies will be
rejected without review. Most importantly, the policies refer to the
anonymity period, which starts at January 22nd, 2018 for ACL 2018.

- You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available
online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server)
during the anonymity period.

- You may not update the non-anonymized version during the anonymity
period, and we ask you not to advertise it on social media or take
other actions that would further compromise double-blind reviewing
during the anonymity period.

The details are described in the section "ACL AUTHOR GUIDELINES". For
the background of the new policies, refer to the online version.

New Policies for Submission, Review, and Citation:
https://www.aclweb.org/portal/content/new-policies-submission-review-and-citation

Detailed descriptions of these areas are provided in the bottom of
this document.

Long Papers

Long ACL 2018 submissions must describe substantial, original,
completed and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete
evaluation and analysis should be included. Review forms will be made
available prior to the deadlines.

Long papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus
unlimited references; final versions of long papers will be given one
additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’
comments can be taken into account.

Long papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by
the program committee. The decisions as to which papers will be
presented orally and which as poster presentations will be based on
the nature rather than the quality of the work. There will be no
distinction in the proceedings between long papers presented orally
and as posters.

Short Papers

ACL 2018 also solicits short papers. Short paper submissions must
describe original and unpublished work. Please note that a short paper
is not a shortened long paper. Instead short papers should have a
point that can be made in a few pages. Some kinds of short papers are:

- A small, focused contribution
- Work in progress
- A negative result
- An opinion piece
- An interesting application nugget

Short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus
unlimited references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five
(5) content pages in the proceedings. Authors are encouraged to use
this additional page to address reviewers’ comments in their final
versions.

Short papers will be presented in one or more oral or poster
sessions. While short papers will be distinguished from long papers in
the proceedings, there will be no distinction in the proceedings
between short papers presented orally and as posters.

General Notes

Papers should not refer, for further detail, to documents that are not
available to the reviewers. Papers may be accompanied by a resource
(software and/or data) described in the paper. Papers that are
submitted with accompanying software/data may receive additional
credit toward the overall evaluation score, and the potential impact
of the software and data will be taken into account when making the
acceptance/rejection decisions.

ACL 2018 also encourages the submission of supplementary material to
report preprocessing decisions, model parameters, and other details
necessary for the replication of the experiments reported in the
paper. Seemingly small preprocessing decisions can sometimes make a
large difference in performance, so it is crucial to record such
decisions to precisely characterize state-of-the-art methods.

Nonetheless, supplementary material should be supplementary (rather
than central) to the paper. It may include explanations or details of
proofs or derivations that do not fit into the paper, lists of
features or feature templates, sample inputs and outputs for a system,
pseudo-code or source code, and data. The paper should not rely on the
supplementary material: while the paper may refer to and cite the
supplementary material and the supplementary material will be
available to reviewers, they will not be asked to review or even
download the supplementary material. Authors should refer to the
contents of the supplementary material in the paper submission, so
that reviewers interested in these supplementary details will know
where to look.

As the reviewing will be blind, papers must not include authors’
names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the
author’s identity, e.g., “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …“
must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as “Smith previously
showed (Smith, 1991) …“ Papers that do not conform to these
requirements will be rejected without review.

Paper Submission and Templates

Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference
management system. The submission site is open at:

https://www.softconf.com/acl2018/papers/

Long/short paper submissions must use the official ACL 2018 style
templates. Long papers must not exceed eight (8) pages of
content. Short papers must not exceed four (4) pages of
content. References do not count against these limits.

All submissions must be in PDF format and must conform to the official
style guidelines, which are contained in these template files.

Multiple Submission Policy

Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or
publications must indicate this at submission time in the START
submission form, and must be withdrawn from the other venues if
accepted by ACL 2018. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at
ACL 2018 must notify the program chairs by the camera-ready deadline
as to whether the paper will be presented. We will not accept for
publication or presentation the papers that overlap significantly in
content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published
elsewhere.

Authors submitting more than one paper to ACL 2018 must ensure that
submissions do not overlap significantly ()25%) with each other in
content or results.

ACL AUTHOR GUIDELINES

ACL 2018 adopts the following guidelines for submission and
citation. Submissions that do not conform to these guidelines will be
rejected without review.

Preserving Double Blind Review

The following rules and guidelines are meant to protect the integrity
of double-blind review and ensure that submissions are reviewed
fairly. The rules make reference to the anonymity period, which runs
from 1 month before the submission deadline up to the date when your
paper is either accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

- You may not make a non-anonymized version of your paper available
online to the general community (for example, via a preprint server)
during the anonymity period. By a version of a paper we understand
another paper having essentially the same scientific content but
possibly differing in minor details (including title and structure)
and/or in length (e.g., an abstract is a version of the paper that
it summarizes).

- If you have posted a non-anonymized version of your paper online
before the start of the anonymity period, you may submit an
anonymized version to the conference. The submitted version must not
refer to the non-anonymized version, and you must inform the program
chair(s) that a non-anonymized version exists. You may not update
the non-anonymized version during the anonymity period, and we ask
you not to advertise it on social media or take other actions that
would further compromise double-blind reviewing during the anonymity
period.

- Note that, while you are not prohibited from making a non-anonymous
version available online before the start of the anonymity period,
this does make double-blind reviewing more difficult to maintain,
and we therefore encourage you to wait until the end of the
anonymity period if possible. Alternatively, you may consider
submitting your work to the Computational Linguistics journal, which
does not require anonymization and has a track for “short” (i.e.,
conference-length) papers.

Citation and Comparison

If you are aware of previous research that appears sound and is
relevant to your work, you should cite it even if it has not been
peer-reviewed, and certainly if it influenced your own work. However,
refereed publications take priority over unpublished work reported in
preprints. Specifically:

- You are expected to cite all refereed publications relevant to your
submission, but you may be excused for not knowing about all
unpublished work (especially work that has been recently posted
and/or is not widely cited).

- In cases where a preprint has been superseded by a refereed
publication, the refereed publication should be cited in addition to
or instead of the preprint version.

Papers (whether refereed or not) appearing less than 3 months before
the submission deadline are considered contemporaneous to your
submission, and you are therefore not obliged to make detailed
comparisons that require additional experimentation and/or in-depth
analysis.

PRESENTATION REQUIREMENT

All accepted papers must be presented at the conference to appear in
the proceedings. At least one author of each accepted paper must
register for ACL 2018 by the early registration deadline.